Bored People Blame the World
Why the restless mind finds enemies everywhere instead of looking inward
Sunday afternoon. Nothing scheduled. No obligations pressing. Hours of unstructured time spreading out ahead of you like an accusation.
You scroll through your phone looking for something to hold your attention. A news story that outrages you. A social media post revealing someone’s hypocrisy. A long article about everything wrong with contemporary culture. Finally, something that grabs. You spend the next two hours reading about problems, thinking about problems, getting progressively more agitated about problems.
By evening, you’re exhausted and irritable despite having done nothing physically demanding. The day that started empty now feels full, except what fills it is a vague sense that everything is getting worse and everyone else is doing it wrong.
What just happened?
Boredom has a special quality. It doesn’t feel like absence. It feels like pressure, like something pushing against you from the inside demanding to be released or resolved. The mind, evolved to solve problems and detect threats, when given nothing specific to work on, starts generating problems and threats from whatever material is available.
The Stoics called this “phantasia kataleptike” though they weren’t thinking about boredom specifically. They meant the impressions that arise unbidden in consciousness, the automatic judgments the mind makes about whatever it encounters. When the mind has no real problems to engage with, it doesn’t rest. It creates phantom problems from thin air, from memory, from projection, from interpretation of ambiguous information as threat.
You’ve probably noticed this with physical stillness. Sit perfectly still and try to do nothing. Within minutes, your mind produces an urgent need to scratch something, shift position, check the time. The discomfort isn’t coming from external circumstances. It’s your mind generating urgency because urgency is more familiar than peace.
Boredom works the same way but at a larger scale. Hours with no clear purpose produce an urgency to find purpose, and the easiest purpose to find is opposition. Being against something requires no construction, no skill, no risk. You just identify what’s wrong and position yourself against it.
Rome’s late Republic collapsed into civil war through exactly this mechanism. The wealthy classes, having secured enough that survival was trivial, turned their restless energy toward factional combat. They didn't need to destroy the Republic to resolve their disputes. But negotiation is slow and unglamorous. War is exciting. So they manufactured existential enemies and tore the thing apart.
Boredom at scale is dangerous. People with too much time and too little purpose don’t become peaceful. They become volatile. They need drama to feel alive, conflict to feel engaged, enemies to feel unified with their faction.
Sound familiar?
Watch what you do when you’re truly bored. Not just momentarily unoccupied but deeply bored with your own life. What captures your attention? Usually something to criticize, someone to mock, some group to feel superior to, some cause to feel righteously angry about.
The criticism feels like engagement. The mockery feels like wit. The superiority feels like standards. The anger feels like values. But probe deeper and you’ll find these are all just ways of feeling something, anything, that isn’t the howling emptiness of having nothing meaningful to do.
Here’s the test: imagine everything you criticize suddenly became perfect. Government worked flawlessly. People behaved with total integrity. Culture reflected your exact values. What would you do with your time?
If the answer makes you uncomfortable, if you can’t immediately imagine how you’d fill your days, then your criticism isn’t really about improving anything. It’s about having something to do.
The Stoics made a distinction between skhole and ascholia. Skhole meant leisure properly used: time for contemplation, learning, conversation that deepens understanding. Ascholia meant the restless busyness that avoids contemplation, the filling of time with activity that produces nothing except the temporary sensation of being occupied.
We’ve completely inverted these. What we call leisure is ascholia: distraction, consumption, entertainment that demands nothing from us. What the Stoics meant by leisure, we’ve almost entirely abandoned. When was the last time you spent hours thinking about a difficult question with no phone, no inputs, just you and the question?
Most people can’t tolerate this for even ten minutes. The mind, deprived of external stimulation, becomes unbearable to its owner. So we reach for the phone, scroll for something that provokes reaction, let that reaction consume us for a while, then repeat.
We’ve become unable to be alone with ourselves, so we fill the space with other people’s problems, other people’s failures, other people’s wrongness. We’ve externalized our consciousness, made it dependent on constant feed of things to react to.
Epictetus would find this pathetic. He taught that freedom means wanting nothing from outside yourself. That dependency on external stimulation is slavery. That a mind that can’t generate its own purpose will be forever at the mercy of whatever catches its attention.
But here’s where it gets insidious. Criticizing the world feels like caring about the world. Spending hours angry about injustice feels morally serious. You’re not wasting time, you’re staying informed. You’re not avoiding your own emptiness, you’re engaged with important issues.
Except you’re doing nothing about any of it. You’re consuming content about problems, discussing problems with other people who are also doing nothing about them, feeling intensely about problems that will remain exactly as they are regardless of how much attention you give them.
You’ve found a way to feel purposeful while avoiding the difficulty of actually building purpose. You’ve discovered you can fill infinite time with opposition while never having to create anything, risk anything, or become capable of anything.
The exhaustion you feel after hours of this should tell you something. You’re tired despite having done nothing because maintaining outrage is work. Sustaining criticism requires energy. Staying angry demands effort. You’ve spent the day working extremely hard at something that produces nothing except your continued need to keep doing it.
What would happen if you took one day and absolutely refused to criticize anything? Refused to read about problems you can’t solve? Refused to consume content designed to provoke outrage? Refused to discuss what’s wrong with the world?
You’d be left with yourself. Your actual life. Your actual circumstances. Your actual choices about how to spend this day. And you’d have to confront whether you’re building anything, learning anything, becoming capable of anything.
For most people, this confrontation is unendurable. The criticism of others is protection from examination of self. The focus on external problems is defense against internal poverty. The righteous anger about the world is anesthesia for despair about your own life.
Seneca watched the wealthy Romans of his time fill their days with complaint about the state of society while their personal lives were shambles of addiction, infidelity, and cruelty to their households. He noticed they’d talk for hours about moral decay while embodying exactly that decay. They needed external problems to focus on so they could avoid seeing they were the problem.
He wrote: “Everyone complains about the shortness of life, yet everyone wastes it.” They’d spend days discussing what’s wrong with Rome while doing nothing to improve their own character, strengthen their own relationships, or build anything of value. The complaint gave structure to otherwise empty days while requiring no actual growth.
You do this in miniature every time you fill empty hours with consumption of criticism. You’re borrowing someone else’s analysis of what’s wrong to avoid developing your own capacity to build what’s right. You’re spectating on problems to avoid participating in solutions. You’re staying angry to avoid staying engaged with anything that might demand you become more than you currently are.
The cure for this isn’t trying to care less about the world. It’s building something that makes the world’s problems compete for your attention instead of dominating it.
When your days are full of genuine challenge, when you’re engaged in work that stretches your capacity, when you’re building or creating or learning something difficult, you don’t have surplus energy for elaborate criticism. You’re too busy doing something to spend hours thinking about what everyone else is doing wrong.
The bored person has this exactly backward. They think once the world improves, they’ll have something worthwhile to do. Actually, once they have something worthwhile to do, the world’s problems will return to their proper proportions: concerning but not consuming, worth addressing where possible but not worth dwelling on where impossible.
📝 Today’s Stoic Gameplan
Notice the reach: Every time you reach for criticism today, pause and ask: “What am I avoiding by focusing on this?” Name the discomfort you’re escaping.
Practice skhole: Set aside thirty minutes with no phone, no inputs, no distractions. Sit with a single question about your own life. Notice how unbearable it becomes to just think.
Take the challenge: Choose one day this week where you don’t criticize anything or consume any criticism. No news, no social media, no discussions of what’s wrong. See what fills the space.
Build instead of blame: Identify one thing you could create, learn, or build that would genuinely challenge you. Start it today. Notice how much less interesting other people’s problems become when you’re engaged with your own growth.
Boredom will keep producing restlessness. That’s guaranteed. The question is whether you’ll fill that restlessness with criticism of a world you can’t control or with creation of a life you can.
Stay stoic,
SW
If you can sit still without the need for distraction for 30 minutes, and feel grateful and happy, you are ahead of 99% of people.
The post was extremely knowledgeable and informative. It helped me look into the matters that were always overlooked. I found the "Today’s Stoic Gameplan" really helpful and would follow it